North Waziristan

When I was a small boy in Scotland, a long time ago, there was a much-feared disease called infantile paralysis. Nobody I knew contracted it, but when you visited somebody in hospital you would see children of your own age on crutches or…

Death has come to mean more than life in our country. The bitter quarrel over martyrdom continues, following the declaration by Syed Munawar Hassan, the chief of the Jamaat-e-Islami, that soldiers killed while fighting the Taliban are not…

Many narratives led to the decisions taken at the APC. These narratives have resulted in what one could call the fog of peace, since they have misguided many and created nothing but confusion.
The main narrative that has been propagated is…

Not long after a general, a lieutenant-colonel and a lance naik lost their lives to ‘our people in the tribal areas’ or ‘the stakeholders’, we have seen the utter monstrosity of the carnage in a Peshawar church. After the killing of our…

While some are celebrating the peaceful transfer of power from one elected civilian regime to another, many feel their stomachs churning. We claim to exalt noble ideals, honesty, justice, transparency and truth in government and, at the…

Punjab, heart and soul of Pakistan, will it also now be the death of Pakistan? Dangerous thought but relevant question because the land of the five rivers, now also the land which rules the rest of troubled Pakistan, has its head buried…

The seeds that we have sown, and some scattered by the howling winds. What will come of this? Of what shape the future when another foreign army, drinking from the cup of humiliation, leaves that graveyard of imperial ambitions,…

Angry about the near total absence of public security, the desperate state of the economy and an increase in sectarian tensions...” Stop! Is this Pakistan? Every word in the sentence is true of our present state of crumble. Actually, it’s…

Until the late 1970s Shias and Sunnis lived in complete harmony in this country. There were sporadic, minor incidents of Shia-Sunni violence but generally there was no hostility between the two sects. Muharram was sacred for Sunnis as well.…

The Soviet pullout from Afghanistan in 1989 was a triumph for our military establishment. The ISI and the Zia regime, while not solely responsible for that outcome, had helped bring it about. But the American pullout from Afghanistan, now…